I mean, this isn't a question. They're saying it outright. When picking who to layoff, race was a factor. If you don't like it, take it up with people making those decisions.
Take it up with your lawyers. I can't believe they admitted it in an official filing. It's like they're begging to be sued.
> The law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, and any other term or condition of employment.
This makes it sound like affirmative action is illegal. But it is currently allowed and many companies brag about doing it.
What Twilio is doing is basically the same. It's like affirmative action for layoffs.
I agree that GP was wrong to say that discrimination is mandated, which it is not.
This is a common tactic from progressive in that they flat out deny the reality that everyone else see. They just say "it doesn't happen" when the CEO in a letter that was filed stated they specifically did this.
Second, the statement clearly says that it is a part of the calculus. Nobody is fired because they are white or black or whatever. The statement is just that it is taken into consideration (which is something that I have issue with).
Please (and I mean this in the most considerate way because you're on the internet just randomly labeling people) touch grass.
Imagine if the response to the Civil rights movement was "its okay stop complaining, race is just part of the calculus we use to determine who gets to go on the front of the bus, no one is forced to sit in the back because of race, it's just part of the calculus". No one would fall for that lame excuse to cover discrimination.
We're not falling for it
Secondly, busing does not compare to at will employment? The analogy also ignores the power dynamic behind racism (and all -isms), but that's a longer discussion than I'm willing to have here.
Lastly, I'm not sure who the "we" was there... but whoever the in-group that you're associate with is, I would suggest they look more at the socioeconomic conditions that we are all living through that lead us to these conversations filled with baseless accusations and labeling rather than making minorities the targets of your fears of replacement.
Whoosah.
I don't have any insight into what they are actually doing.
It is you parachuting in to be offended that is the disingenuous thing here.
Replace all the groups with "white men", and if it seems racist then, well, it's also racist when it's any other group except "white men".
Without looking anything up tell me what you know about it.
But since neither I nor any of the employees there were ever a slave, I have no idea why a histy so old has to be taken in consideration.
The answer also shows a lack of knowledge about anything other than the headline "slavery".
Mind, I'm also not particularly comfortable with racist hiring practices, no matter who's being targeted. Just pointing out that widespread de jure inequality based on race, plus various extremely-racist practices that were carried out and weren't illegal (as distinct from the law calling for racial discrimination explicitly, which was also still a thing then) were major factors in the US until not that long ago, including, crucially, housing and financial discrimination that left black people behind in the post-WWII economic boom—the short version is that they were flat-out banned from many of the best up-and-coming neighborhoods, and if they could find a good neighborhood that'd let them buy a house, they'd have, all else being equal, a much harder time securing a loan than a white person. This had measurable and pronounced effects on poverty rates and general financial well-being for them and their families, decades later.
And even the US Civil War wasn't that long ago. There were still a handful of former slaves alive in the 1960s when the civil rights movement was going on, IIRC. The US Civil War was the early and mid 1860s, about 100 years earlier—there were no combatants left alive by the 1960s ("fun fact": a few married-later-in-life widows of soldiers were still alive and receiving Civil War pensions, though!) but there were surely at least a few born-into-slavery-in-1865 slaves still alive 95-100 years later. The war freed them from slavery but they spent basically their whole lives under regimes of legally endorsed racial discrimination, with the tide only turning as the last of them died.
I'd also just like to highlight how much extrajudicial violence there was perpetrated by white men against minorites, which while technically illegal was just completely overlooked by the white male dominated political and judicial system. For example the Tulsa Race Massacre.
I mean just look at Ahmaud Arbery, whose 3 white male murderers were initially not arrested or charged with a clearly obvious murder. In 2020!
Thanks! Was trying to keep it concise and tight enough to be both informative and interesting to someone who's not American, while still hitting the "highlights", especially the relative recency of outright racist laws and of how recently private and public racial discrimination was legal (if not always required by law) and normal.
> I'd also just like to highlight how much extrajudicial violence there was perpetrated by white men against minorites, which while technically illegal was just completely overlooked by the white male dominated political and judicial system. For example the Tulsa Race Massacre.
... which is why I didn't even try to cover these instances of what I guess could be grouped together as something like "civil strife", which actions were or are explicitly outside the law, not simply not-illegal, but have been or are often tolerated or overlooked, but you're absolutely right to bring them up.
In the case of the Civil Rights Movement it wasn't only (though, to be clear, it was mostly) black people being killed by racists, often with no consequences for the perpetrators—several white participants in civil rights marches and rallies were also targeted and murdered. Often Quakers or (IIRC?) Catholics, participating in part due to their religious convictions—the whole "social justice" angle held greater sway in US Catholicism then than it does now, I gather, which was also evident in the anti-war movement of the 60s and 70s. These killings weren't legal, of course, and I expect they'd have been quite unpopular if you'd polled the whole US population, but such actions had enough support locally, including among public officials, that many of the killers escaped justice anyway, so long as the killings were in the name of preserving white supremacy, even if that meant killing some white people, too.
A read over a Wikipedia timeline of 1960s US history is pretty wild—the entire decade was batshit crazy, not to put too fine a point on it.
Who are you to quiz random people on the internet on historical context, and what does that have to do with the legality of hiring or firing based on race?
It seems to me like you're trying to justify institutionalized systematic racism on the basis of 'historical context'.
Most people are willfully ignorant and like to "play dumb" while making bad faith arguments about issues like this. I was merely trying to inquire if the OC was ignorant and willing to learn or willfully ignorant.
race plays a role in college admissions, and now in this layoff, and maybe hiring at the same company. so clearly it has relevance today in its current context.
>it would be very difficult to understand the point of the policies.
which policies? making hiring and firing decisions based on race is illegal in the USA.
>Most people are willfully ignorant and like to "play dumb" while making bad faith arguments about issues like this. I was merely trying to inquire if the OC was ignorant and willing to learn or willfully ignorant.
You didn't make any arguments at all, you just started quizzing them on their knowledge.
Again, it just seems like you're trying to legitimize systemic institutional racism on the basis of 'historical context' of a 'social construct'.
But I bet you’ll say that I don’t make sense and that I don’t understand anything, and that history this and context that. So be it. Proves my point, in a way. Dragonslayers turning into the dragons they’ve slain and all that.
Taking offense to unfair firing practices also doesn't mean one doesn't take offense to unfair hiring practices. But the topic at hand is layoff, not hiring.
The argument seems to be "a little discrimination is okay". So, I guess the question would be, what is an acceptable coefficient for the race variable, for it to be okay?
"Part of the calculus" implies there is a specific point at which racial discrimination stepwise goes from bad to not-bad, and I'm curious what that weighting value is.
Obviously if I institute a total no-blacks policy, that's a problem. But what if I only mark down black people, say, 20%? Are EEOC investigators going to rubber-stamp my racist employment decisions then?
I can't say wether anything like that was the case, nor would I counter the experience of responders here saying that they as minorities find actions like Twillio's harmful. Nor do I comment on whether the messaging was done well. Only that the situation can have nuance.